ABB values Mitsubishi Electric's breakers at 1.4x sales, four days after Foxconn's 0.37x for its car parts

ABB prints the price of Japan's breaker market

ABB, the Swiss electrification and automation group, said on October 20, 2026, that it will pay JPY 79 billion, about $495 million, for a controlling 51 percent of a joint venture holding Mitsubishi Electric's carved-out low-voltage power distribution business, plus the related sales operations outside Japan, with a mid-term option to take it all ¹. The unit, some 2,800 people building circuit breakers, contactors and backup UPS systems in Fukuyama, Japan, and Hanoi, Vietnam, booked net sales of about JPY 102 billion in the year to March 2026 ¹.

ABB printed the valuation in the release↗: enterprise value of about $890 million, or 1.4 times sales and 11.1 times EBITDA, easing to the mid-to-high single digits once expected synergies land ¹. Chief executive Morten Wierod's summary sets a target of at least a 20 percent Operational EBITA margin within five years ².

The deal landed beside ABB's third-quarter report↗: record orders of $12.06 billion, up 40 percent, led by data centers, with Electrification, the division doing the buying, up 70 percent ²³. The shares still fell more than 5 percent as AI worries swept European markets ¹².

Foxconn's Friday check came with a ¥100 billion write-down

Four days earlier, on Friday October 16, 2026, Hon Hai Precision Industry of Taiwan, the company the world calls Foxconn▲+0.84% — Foxconn, up 0.84 percent today, signed through its investment arm Lin Yin↗ for 50 percent of Mitsubishi Electric Mobility, the car-parts unit spun out in April 2024 ⁴⁵. The ¥115 billion price, about $727 million, values the business at ¥320 billion enterprise value↗: 0.37 times sales, about six times operating profit ⁴. Closing is expected in October 2027 ⁴⁶.

The write-down is mechanical: the ¥230 billion equity value sits below the unit's roughly ¥352 billion of net assets, so Mitsubishi Electric expects to book a ¥100 billion impairment this fiscal year ⁴.

The car unit brought in ¥875.6 billion of revenue in the year to March 2026, down ¥43.5 billion on the year before, and is guided to ¥820 billion this year against a partners' target above ¥1 trillion by the fiscal year starting April 2030 ⁴.

The tell is what the ¥194 billion buys

The same Tokyo board sold two hardware businesses inside four days, and both prices are multiples on the year ended March 2026 ¹⁴. ABB's case is its own sales channel, with "long-term returns well above cost of capital" in Wierod's words ². Foxconn's is the software: Jun Seki, its EV chief strategy officer and a former Nissan executive, told reporters "what attracted us most was the electronic-control technology" ⁷.

Takayuki Tsuzuki, the Mitsubishi Electric senior executive officer who keeps the factory automation group, signed a handover note praising a power distribution business built over "the past 100 years" ¹. The two checks sum to about ¥194 billion, for businesses that generated roughly a sixth of group revenue of ¥5,894.7 billion last year ¹⁴.

What stays is factory automation, cooling, and power semiconductors already in merger talks with the chipmaker Rohm and Toshiba since March ⁴⁵. When Mitsubishi Electric reports at the end of October, watch where the money goes: factory automation, the power-chip merger, or the roughly €5 billion European arm of TK Elevator it is reportedly circling↗ ⁵⁸. The checks cover about a fifth of that one.